


Virginia is for Lovers

by sassyjumper



Series: Post-finale Road Trip [1]
Category: House M.D.
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-11
Updated: 2013-01-11
Packaged: 2017-11-25 04:01:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/634904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sassyjumper/pseuds/sassyjumper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>House and Wilson eat, drink and talk in Virginia</p>
            </blockquote>





	Virginia is for Lovers

“My friend here is dying. What do you recommend?” House peered up at their waitress and smiled sweetly.

They’d pulled off of I-81 in Virginia to try this “old timey” restaurant Wilson had found on his iPad during their last pit stop.

_It’s in a converted farmhouse_ , Wilson had cooed.

_There’s a front porch with a swing!_ he’d continued, as if he were speaking to someone who wasn’t House.

Then Wilson had apparently remembered exactly who he was talking to. _It’s Southern-style. Biscuits, gravy, coronary warnings on the menu—that kind of thing_.

_Why didn’t you lead with that?_ House had asked, reasonably.

And there they’d landed. At Home Place restaurant, nestled in the gently rolling farmlands of a valley in the Blue Ridge mountains.

Their waitress, a 40-ish woman with generous curves, blinked at House’s statement, but otherwise maintained her blandly pleasant expression.

She tapped the corner of her mouth with the eraser end of her pencil, then concluded: “People really love our pulled pork.”

House opened his mouth, but Wilson was too fast. “ _House_ ,” he said warningly, from across the quaint wood table.

House looked back at him, feigning puzzlement.

“Here’s how it works,” the waitress interjected, with the polite yet no-nonsense tone of a pro. “You can pay thirteen dollars and have your choice of two meats, or fourteen and get three meats.”

“House,” Wilson said again, quieter but more menacing.

House furrowed his brow, then turned his attention back to the waitress. “That’s quite a bargain. It only makes sense to go for three meats.”

The waitress nodded. “So there’s the pulled pork,” she reminded. “The fried chicken and roast beef are also excellent—”

“Sounds good!” House barked.

“OK then,” the waitress said. She turned to Wilson and, House noted, her features softened a bit. Wilson had gone back to shaving, so he’d regained that harmless, “who me?” look that House lacked. “What about you, sir?”

Wilson’s eyes widened. “Oh. Well. I just thought, with all that meat—” He cringed and House smiled.

“You can share,” their waitress piped up. “But I’ll still have to charge you fourteen each.”

House put on his best “seriously?” face and let his arms fall limply to his sides. “Oh, for the love of—He’s _dying_!”

“ _House_ ,” Wilson said through gritted teeth.

The waitress regarded them both for a moment. “He looks pretty healthy,” she said, with a small smile toward Wilson.

House rolled his eyes. Then he watched as Wilson threw him a smirk that effortlessly morphed into an earnest smile as he looked up at the waitress.

“Of course,” Wilson said. “That’s fine, um…” He made a show of looking for her nametag.

“Carolyn,” the waitress offered.

“Carolyn,” Wilson repeated, then paused like he was savoring the melodic sound. “And do we get sides with that?” he added, with a shy sort of laugh that ensured, yes, by god, there would be sides.

Carolyn nodded, with a bit more pep than previously. “Served family-style, so you both can just dig in,” she said, then giggled just a little.

House gagged just a little.

“That sounds great,” Wilson said quickly, looking at House. “I definitely want mashed potatoes. And biscuits with apple butter. And—”

“Slo-ow down there, partner,” House interrupted, in what Wilson called his George W. Bush voice.

House looked at Carolyn, then spoke from the side of his mouth: “His eyes are way bigger than his stomach. Heh, maybe even bigger than his—”

“Cole slaw!” Wilson cried out.

A few people at nearby tables turned to look their way, clearly unaccustomed to emotional pleas for slaw.

Wilson’s cheeks reddened, right to the level that House liked best. “We’ll have cole slaw, too, please,” Wilson said, at a sane volume. “And that’s all, thank you.”

Carolyn took their menus and started to walk away, but suddenly turned. “Oh. How about some sweet tea, honey?” she asked, looking at Wilson.

Wilson smiled, first at House, then Carolyn. “I’d love some. Thank you.”

Carolyn darted her eyes toward House. “You, too?”

“Uh, _yeah_.” House felt a jolt of jealousy as Carolyn walked away. And he suspected it had little to do with nearly being snubbed on the sweet tea.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

“Keep flirting, _Cancer_ nova. We are soooo getting free dessert,” House said, before slurping the last of his second sweet tea through the straw.

“I think dessert comes with the…gluttony we ordered,” Wilson said. “But you might have screwed us on that when you started throwing chicken bones over your shoulder like King Henry.”

House grinned. “Hey, I paid fourteen damn dollars…” He saw the corners of Wilson’s mouth twitch and knew victory was his. Let the Carolyns of the world come with their sweet tea and free cobbler!

“We’ve got cherry cobbler, if you’ve got the room,” House heard the coy voice behind him. Then he mimicked her, in a private show for Wilson, fluttering his eyelashes.

House could see Wilson biting the insides of his cheeks. “Well,” Wilson said, exhaling a laugh. “Sure. We’re just passing through, and I’d regret not having the cobbler.”

“Oh, where are you heading?” Carolyn asked.

House turned in his chair to look at her. “I told you. He’s dying. We’re doing that bucket-list thingy. His number-one goal is to sample all the cobbler the Eastern seaboard has to offer.”

Carolyn put her hands on her hips and just looked at House for a moment. He briefly wondered if she was going to clock him.

But then she turned her eyes toward Wilson. “Sir, I’m not going to ask if that’s true or not, because it’s not my business. But I sure hope you have a nice trip. I’ll be back with that cobbler.”

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

“This is the gayest thing we could possibly do,” House said, as he and Wilson sat in the gazebo just outside of Home Place.

He looked at Wilson, who just smiled as he gazed down at his boots. “No, really,” House tried again. “Actually having sex would be less gay than this.”

“Duly noted,” Wilson said, sounding a bit wistful.

_Uh-oh_ , House thought. _Feelings are being felt_.

They’d only been on the road for a couple weeks. At first, they’d headed north. Wilson had nattered on about Vermont and covered bridges. But once there, he’d realized that soon it would be ungodly hot in the Southeast, so they better head there sooner than later.

Things tended to get complicated when Wilson overthought, House knew all too well.

But he’d gone along with Wilson’s wishes, and they’d made their way to 1-81 in upstate New York. The highway roughly followed the Appalachian Trail, and that pleased Wilson, for unknown reasons.

“What do you want to do now?” House asked, knowing that an occupied Wilson mind was a safer Wilson mind. “Nothing here but farms.”

A breeze came and Wilson tilted his head back. It was late afternoon and the sun was behind them. “Let’s sit for a while,” Wilson said lazily.

“Yeah, fine. I meant later. What do you want to do?”

“Well,” Wilson glanced at him. “Roanoke is close, and I saw a flyer for a sidewalk art fair.”

House looked at his friend. “Sounds good…Hey! Then tonight we can curl up with season three of _Murder, She Wrote_ and eat stewed prunes.”

“It went downhill in season three. _Oh_ , are you voicing disapproval?” Wilson asked, raising an eyebrow. House tried not to smile.

“Let’s just find a place to stay, then find a bar,” House said. “We don’t even need dinner, after that orgy.”

Wilson groaned.

“Hey, we haven’t been to a bar in I don’t know how long,” House grouched. “I’m sitting in your gay gazebo—your _gayzebo_. You can sit with me in a bar.”

Wilson sighed. “House, why can’t we just sit and enjoy the fresh air and be _quiet_? Why is that so hard?”

House paused at the question. He couldn’t say why. He just knew it was hard.

“So can we hit a bar later, or…”

Wilson let out a short laugh. “Yeah. OK.”

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

“Wilson, there is a direct inverse correlation between how much alcohol you drink and your level of dweeb…osity?” House said, as he poured beer from the pitcher into his friend’s glass.

They’d found the kind of roadside bar where one expects Patrick Swayze to be keeping thugs in line.

Small groups of men with large shares of testosterone talked and laughed loudly; a smaller number of women, also with robust testosterone levels, did the same. And Hank Williams Jr. was proclaiming from the jukebox that a country boy can survive.

House was glad Wilson looked so thoroughly un-Wilson-y—still in the jeans, boots and leather jacket that were requisite for the way they were traveling. If he’d looked like his dorky self, he’d be an instant target for people like these bar patrons. Or people like House.

Wilson looked at him with slightly glassy eyes. “What I meant was, you become less of a dweeb, the more you drink,” House clarified, since Wilson was now on his fifth glass.

Wilson giggled.

House sighed. “But you become more of a moron.”

“Oh-ho no!” Wilson wagged his index finger in that way that made House feel like he’d been caught whispering in the library. “ _You’re_ the one who punches people, and wanders into other people’s homes, and—”

“And throws things till the cops come,” House picked up, “and roams the streets pants-free, and molests ducks—Oh no, wait! That’s you.”

Wilson giggled. House was sensing a pattern.

Which was fine, since it was the pattern he wanted. A drunk, giggly Wilson he could handle with his formidable intellect tied behind his back. But the less predictable, pensive Wilson—the one who wanted gazebo time and Roanoke—that variation was trouble.

Unfortunately, Wilson picked that moment to get into Hank Williams Jr.’s ramblings. He started half-mumbling, half-singing the only part of the chorus he could apparently discern: “And a country boy can survive! Country folks can survive!”

Wilson’s giggling started to turn into laughing. Weird, slightly maniacal laughing. “ _That’s_ my problem, House!” he said suddenly, and with a terrible Southern accent. “I ain’t no country boy.”

“You sure ain’t,” House said in a low voice. “And let’s not make fun of country boys in this particular venue. At least not loud enough for them to hear.”

Wilson settled down. Then he looked at House and exclaimed, like it was an unprecedented thought, “We should do something!”

House looked at his own untouched glass, then at Wilson’s oft-touched glass. “We are doing something.”

“No-ooo,” Wilson waved his hand as if mosquitoes were attacking. “I mean like, let’s play pooool. Or…darts!”

“No way am I giving you darts and remaining in the room,” House informed him.

Giggles.

House felt his mouth twitching despite all efforts to remain disgusted by his friend.

“House,” Wilson’s mouth suddenly became pouty. “I wanna do something besides sit here.”

House shook his head. “What happened to Gazebo Guru?” He shifted to his “zen voice.” “‘House, I just want some time in quiet contemplation.’”

“Been there, done that,” Wilson said, taking one last swig to empty his glass. He eyed the pool table, where a few people were already waiting to play. “I wanna shoot stick.”

He stood up unsteadily, then shut his eyes tightly before refocusing. House half-stood and grabbed Wilson’s arm.

“You are awful at pool,” he hissed. “And this is not foosball in the oncology lounge. You have to call your shots and know the rules, or one of these country boys might get _really, really_ mad at you for wasting his time.”

Wilson shook his arm loose. “Jeez, House. Do ya want me to be less _dweeby_ , or not? Do ya want me to sit, or do things? I’m getting a lotta mixed s-signals.”

“I—” House stopped, because he wasn’t sure what was supposed to come next.

So he settled on containment: “Well, right now I want you to sit down before we get any more stares.”

Wilson complied but sulked. House played with the condensation on his glass while he considered Wilson’s questions. What did he want Wilson to do?

Nothing really. He just wanted him to be Wilson. And not stop.

House took a deep breath. This was going to be so lame.

“I want you to…to just drink your drink and hang out with me,” he said finally, internally cringing. “I want you to _not_ get beat up by the Hank Williams clan…I want to not worry about you.”

Wilson looked at him through his eyelashes. House squirmed.

Wilson bit his lip, then said, “You want to just do our old routine, except in a different location every day?”

Hearing it out loud, House was surprised at how true that statement was. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Like nothing’s changed. We’re just taking it on the road.”

“Like we’re the touring company of _Cats_?”

“Like _Cats_ ,” House agreed, solemnly.

Wilson giggled. Then he hiccupped and sobered a little. “And I keep making you do things we would never do back home—” He glanced at House; they’d both, by unspoken pact, been trying to stop calling the old life “home.”

But House brushed it off. “You’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing. All the things you want to do before…Whatever.”

Wilson looked away, and House watched his profile as he worked his jaw in that familiar way.

“I—I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time,” Wilson admitted.

He glanced at House, then looked sheepish as he averted his gaze to his empty glass. “Every day, I feel like…every stupid place we go, I have to try something new.

“A-and every little thing has to have _meaning_. We hafta eat somewhere that has a history, or something. I hafta take walks and…reflect, and look at sunsets and art and cows—”

“Wilson,” House interrupted and waited for Wilson to look at him. “Sometimes it’s OK to just eat at Shoney’s.”

Wilson giggled a little, but then pulled a face. “Actually, that’s never OK.”

House smirked. “Point taken.”

Wilson glanced at him again, then hesitated before rambling, “Aaand is it OK if some nights I just wanna eat pizza and watch America’s most…most desperate housewives from wherever, and not talk about anything that’s deep, in any way?”

House did not hesitate. “Absolutely.”

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

They made it back to the motel in reasonable shape. No small feat since House had been the designated driver and Wilson had ridden on the back of his bike. “Don’t let go, moron,” House had said after Wilson wrapped his arms firmly around House’s ribs.

It was barely a 10-minute ride, but House’s nerves had been on edge the whole time. He’d gripped the handlebars so tightly his hands were trembling by the time he’d finally let go in the Motel 6 parking lot.

Now, surrounded by the nondescript trappings of their room, he could finally pop a couple pills and relax. He propped himself against the headboard of one of the double beds and started channel-surfing with his left hand—so his right was free to knead his thigh.

House searched fruitlessly for some variation of the housewives before giving up and landing on _My Strange Addiction_. This particular episode featured a man in an intimate relationship with his own car.

House heard Wilson emerge from the bathroom. Or actually, he smelled him. Wilson’s bedtime grooming involved some sort of coconut-y lotion; he’d claimed his skin was chafing from the wind and leather and constant sarcasm.

“Is that guy kissing his car?” Wilson asked through a yawn.

“Hush,” House chastised. “I wanna see if he gets to second base.”

Then he felt the left side of the bed dip. He shifted his eyes to see Wilson pulling right up alongside him. “What are you doing?”

“Sitting,” Wilson said, arranging a pillow so he could rest against the headboard, too.

Then there was silence, except for the guy on TV explaining how, before he’d met his car, he’d never felt so completely and inexplicably taken with someone in his life. And then:

“I just absolutely love Chase,” the guy said.

House looked at Wilson, whose eyes were wide.

Then Wilson broke into a fit of giggles. Infectious giggles, because soon House was giggling—though he would never admit, under pain of death, that those sounds were giggles.

Soon Wilson’s giggles turned into coughing, causing him to lean forward and hold his stomach. House awkwardly patted his back until the coughing subsided. “You OK?” he asked as Wilson took a couple gulping breaths.

“Yeah.” When Wilson sat back up, his face was red and his eyes were watery but he was smiling.

“Hee-hee!” He choked out one last giggle. House smiled.

They fell into silence again as Wilson assumed his previous position, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

House let the peace last a good couple minutes before it started making his skin feel prickly.

“You remember what I said in that stupid gazebo?” he asked, without looking at Wilson. “Well, _this_ , right here, invalidates all of that.”

House couldn’t really see, but he sensed Wilson rolling his eyes. Then he turned his head just a bit and saw that Wilson was looking directly at him. He’d changed into gray sweats and a blue hoodie, and looked much more like old Wilson—and yet somehow less so.

A smile spread across Wilson’s face.

“I can’t help it,” he told House. “It makes no sense. But until I met you, I was never so completely and inexplicably taken with someone in my life—”

“Oh, ha, _ha_!”

Wilson didn’t giggle this time, but just kept smiling.

House sighed. “Do I need to take you in for a psych evaluation? I did some observing today, too, and discovered that Roanoke has a fine mental health facility—”

Wilson scooted a little closer, then plonked his giant, coconut-scented head right against House’s shoulder.

“What is with you?” House asked the disheveled brown hair now attached to him.

“Hush,” Wilson mumbled. “Still drunk. Yer making my head hurt.”

“ _I’m_ making _your_ —You know what? Fine. Your stupid coconut head doesn’t bother me.”

House felt the warm exhale of Wilson’s laugh against his arm. “It’s new,” Wilson mumbled. House looked down but didn’t say anything. “We’d never do this at home,” Wilson added sleepily.

House kept looking, but Wilson didn’t move or say anything more. Then he felt his friend’s breathing even out.

House turned his attention back to the TV, switching the remote to his right hand so as not to disturb Wilson. He’d hate to wake him up now. Wilson was way less annoying when he was asleep.

 

 

 

NOTES: Home Place is real!: <http://www.yelp.com/biz/home-place-restaurant-catawba>

So is that episode of My Strange Addiction! (I made up the dialogue, based on a couple clips I found -- with the exception of the line about “Chase,” which is a direct quote): <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/10/my-strange-addiction-cars_n_1268798.html>


End file.
